Every Parent Matters

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http://www.stopinjusticenow.com/News_0358.htm
I stand for a Britain that supports as first class citizens not just some children and some families but supports all children and all families.’ UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s commitment in his conference speech to helping all families sounds liberal and caring. But state intervention in cases of desperate hardship or vulnerability has expanded into an increasingly hands-on approach to family life that undermines parents and important personal freedoms. The publication in June 2007 of the Care Matters: Time for Change White Paper by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) has drawn attention to the British state’s poor record with regards children in the care system. Children who have lived in care have poorer educational performance and employment prospects than children living in families, and a stronger likelihood that they’ll go on to get a criminal record or sleep rough. Things have been improving, though. The proportion of children in care in the UK has reduced from around 7.5 per 1,000 (ie, 100,000 children) in the 1970s, to around 5.5 per 1,000 (or 70,000 children) today. But even this is to overestimate the numbers who spend prolonged periods in care. There has also been a shift from a reliance on residential provision (or children’s homes) to foster care and kinship arrangements, and increasing success in keeping children with their families. So, awful as it can be, the care experience is not as bad as it once was. But the care system is just one part of the much larger children’s social care system. While the focus on the dire prospects of the 8,000 young people leaving the care system each year is understandable, it leaves unexamined the broader implications of the so-called ‘corporate parenting’ role assumed by the state. The wider Every Child Matters agenda (which informs Care Matters) is ostensibly the government’s response to the inquiry into the death of Victoria Climbié at the hands of her carers (her aunt and her aunt’s partner) in 2000. But the reform agenda has remarkably little to say about how to tackle child abuse. Instead, the government has turned a rare child tragedy into a far-reaching agenda for change in the provision of children’s services as a whole. There was an explosion of child protection inquiries in the 1970s, sometimes resulting in legislative and structural change. But never before has a government’s response to a child’s death been so sweeping in its implications for all children and families. The new agenda is about prevention, early intervention and safeguarding – in other words, protecting children from innumerable risks to their well-being, not just (or even predominantly) abuse or neglect.